“By George, that’s a great kid!” he ejaculated, clambering into his sagging buggy. “The old witch was right—wild as a hawk, but what a magnificent young brute he is!”
He saw that his daughter’s hands, gathering up the reins, were not quite steady, and that there was rare color in her golden-olive cheeks. “Lord, Glen,” he gave her knee a reassuring pat, “you don’t want to mind that! Not a bit of harm! He just——”
“I don’t mind,” said the girl, stressing the pronoun, marveling at him still.
“Best blood in the country, as I’ve told you before,” he went on. “Good, solid, Scotch and English stock. Good, clean blood—hot blood, I’ll admit, but it’s an honest red, not a washed-blue like your mother’s idols on The Hill!” He always snapped when he spoke of his dead wife. “Golly, if you could set that boy on the right road, you’d feel you’d done something, by George! There’s something to that lad, lemme tell you, besides a necktie and a shine! Why, he could take one of those young whipper-snappers and wring his neck like a chicken’s, with one hand tied behind him!”
“Yes!” Glen kindled to the picture.
Her father screwed himself round in the seat to look at her. “Yes, and I’d rather see you married to one of his sort, when the time comes, than one of those idle-born, overfed, underworked blue bloods!” he exploded.
His daughter nodded in calm agreement, quite without self-consciousness. “Yes,” she said again.
Darrow stared at her. His slow-footed, plodding imagination had suddenly sprouted wings on its heels. There had been something in the spectacle of those two gorgeous young creatures—the dark and splendid boy, his copper-maned, glowing girl—that instant when his brown fingers were twisted in her blazing hair, her head flung back, the fine fearlessness of her! Two beautiful bold young things! Why wasn’t it a possibility, by George, if he took the lad under his wing? When Glen was grown, of course—ten years from now—and the hill savage tamed—but not too much!
He was silent, dramatizing the situation to himself, and the girl did not speak. How much was she impressed? He wondered.
“And the old woman was great, too,” said the doctor, out of a long meditation. “Like an old tribal priestess! They tell me, for a fact, she’s a hundred and three! Can’t write her name, never seen a town or a railroad train, but she wants her ‘son’s son’s son fotched on!’ Well, we’ll look out for him, won’t we?”